World Cup Challenges Bosses

To Minimize Productivity Drop, They Juggle Worker Schedules and Bring In TVs

By

Dana Mattioli And

Javier Espinoza

Updated June 13, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

The World Cup's winner won't be determined until July. But there are already clear losers: bosses.

ENLARGE

Mexican fans cheer on their team at El Paso Taqueria in New York Friday morning as it tied South Africa 1-1.
Alfred Giancarli for The Wall Street Journal

On Friday, managers on both sides of the Atlantic braced for the quadrennial month-long productivity drain that soccer's global championship brings. The tournament lasts more than four weeks, with many games scheduled in the middle of the workday in the Americas and Europe.

In soccer-mad countries like the U.K., many companies don't even try to ban the matches. Some let employees watch games at work. At others, managers juggle staffers' schedules to accommodate game-watching.

In Paraguay, President Fernando Lugo issued a decree giving public workers Monday afternoon off to watch Paraguay's game against Italy.

In past years, the U.S. was mostly immune to the contagion. But this year, Americans' growing World Cup curiosity sparked scattered hooky outbreaks on Friday, the first day of play.

In the U.K., productivity losses tied to the World Cup could total just under £1 billion ($1.45 billion), according to a survey by the Chartered Management Institute. Just over half of working men and 21% of working women intend to watch the matches scheduled to take place during office hours as they happen, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP survey of 1,000 U.K. workers.

Asda, the British arm of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., is giving employees the opportunity to take a "Safari Sabbatical," an unpaid leave of up to two weeks, if they want to go to South Africa.

The company will also let workers swap shifts, take extended breaks and request days off to watch the games on television. Managers will also tune TVs for sale on the shop floor to the World Cup so that staffers can keep tabs on matches.

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"We trust our colleagues who do work to get on with their jobs whilst keeping an eye on the score," says a spokeswoman for the supermarket chain, which employs 170,000 people across 376 stores in the U.K.

Jonathan Grant, who manages a team of seven in London as a director in climate-change services at PwC, is letting staffers come in and leave early on days with afternoon England games. His staff includes workers of three different nationalities, so he'll also redistribute tasks to minimize conflicts with the games of others' home teams.

But the firm is drawing the line at allowing employees to watch games on TV in open-layout areas. "The cheering and shouting can be a bit distracting for your colleagues on a conference call," says Mr. Grant., who concedes that "football isn't top of my list for sport."

Americans aren't nearly as fanatical as many Britons are. But soccer is gaining traction in the U.S. In 2006, a total of 78 million U.S. viewers watched the World Cup on Walt Disney Co.'s channels, up from 70 million in 2002, and those numbers don't include Spanish-language viewership. Last June, nearly seven million U.S. viewers watched the U.S. lose to Brazil in the FIFA Confederations Cup Final, according to Nielsen Co.

Already on Friday, there were signs that some U.S. workers weren't paying full attention to their jobs. The morning's Mexico-South Africa game, which kicked off at 10 a.m., right in the middle of the East Coast work morning, became the most watched game ever on ESPN3, formerly ESPN360, which ESPN uses to live stream sporting events via the Internet. Only U.S. viewers can access the live streams.

The game drew more than 500,000 viewers, 178% more than the previous high-water mark, a 2009 football game between the University of Southern California and Ohio State.

At Nevada Smiths, owner Jack Keane said the popular New York soccer bar was packed Friday morning for the game. "The place is full. A lot of people are coming from work," he said, shouting to be heard over fans. "And most people are drinking alcohol."

Some Americans who ditched work for the game showed more enthusiasm than knowledge. Four Americans, branch managers of Banco Santander SA's Sovereign Bank, had a district meeting earlier Friday and were supposed to head back to work. Instead, at 2:30 they popped into O'Lunney's Pub in midtown to watch France play Uruguay. They had noticed there was more hype in the U.S. surrounding this World Cup and were curious what the fuss was about.

It was the first time one of them, Justin Braithwaite, had ever watched a soccer game at a bar. In the future, "I plan on having more of an interest in soccer," the 33-year-old said.

He's rooting for the U.S. this time around, but he and his three co-workers could name only one player on the team: midfielder Landon Donovan.

At Pony Xpress Printing Inc. in Garland, Texas, principal partner Jeff Henderson originally gave his employees—many of whom are of Mexican descent—the opportunity to work overtime earlier in the week so they could take off Friday to watch Mexico play. But on Wednesday, the 45-employee screen-printing company got some large rush projects that required a full staff Friday.

Fearing employees might call in sick, Mr. Henderson and his three partners struck a compromise: They told workers that they would have to come in but that TVs tuned to the game would be set up in the warehouse and conference room. "You could see the disappointment on some of their faces," he says.

Everyone showed up, he says, but he acknowledges there was "some decreased production." A fan himself, Mr. Henderson would speak with a reporter only during halftime.

In Manhattan, Zurich-based Credit Suisse is showing U.S. and Swiss World Cup games that fall during the work week in its auditorium. The company sent a memo inviting employees, with one caveat: They must first get their boss's approval.

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